Angie's adventures through the world of entrepreneurship, life after grad school, and Memphis.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Cool donation site

I found a great site today that I think you should look at. It's called Donors Choose and it allows people who want to give money to education to interact directly with the teachers who are in need of funding.

A teacher submits a project with a description, location, project cost, and % of low income students at the school.--------------------------------------------------------

I teach at a high school in San Francisco that sends nearly all its students, 91 percent of whom are of color, to college.

One big push lately has been to teach SATish vocabulary words directly to boost their college test scores and to enhance their formal writing.

This year, all my 100 tenth graders will learn 500 SAT vocabulary words! We're about 70% there right now. And the success rate so far is high: About 90% of students get A's and B's on their comprehensive weekly quizzes, which require remembering all the words from August!

But because our Humanities Department budget is limited, we don't have money for dictionaries. I want my students not to be afraid of dictionaries. (And our school doesn't have enough computers, so the students can't go to www.dictionary.com.)

I'm asking for enough funds to purchase 14 paperback dictionaries, one for every two students in a class.

Thank you for considering my proposal!

The cost of 14 copies of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary for this proposal is $137, including shipping and fulfillment.